You may be interested in our amazing software, alternative to commercial frameworks with obsolete and/or banausic programming constructs. It is completely free (license: BSD) and cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac etc) Python language modules. The software is published quarterly since 2007 and already has some essential applications. We expect it to become even more popular when NumPy will got full support in PyPy (with dynamic compilation).

OpenOpt framework - universal numerical optimization package with several own solvers (e.g. ralg) and connections to tens of other, graphical output of convergence and many other goodies